I am a long time user of BitDefender security packages - AntiVirus and Firewall.During the first few years, this product was my favorite among the competition.It was fast, not hogging the computer, had a low number of false positives, not causing any problems, and the technical support was easily available and mostly helpful.

This last year, I believe will be the last year I am paying my yearly fee to BitDefender.These are the main reasons:

1. It has become quite bloated with many different modules

2. Some modules cause Windows to crash when some applications are running (firewall + file sharing).

3. Technical support is now almost impossible to reach

4. When you finally get to tech support, you get a reply about 50% of the time, with a long delay.

5. The replies you receive from tech support, either tell you to download a new version (which was unaccessible at the time of trying) or to run a long sequence of debugging and "memory dump" to send to their technicians - as if I am paid to do QA on their products.

6. Searching their own forums for the same problem as I encountered, revealed many other people have it - they all get a personal "check your email" reply as an answer.

I am not sure yet which security package I will use next, and if it will be a free one or a paid one, but in my book, a paying customer needs to get access to customer service.

I hate to see BitDefender go down like this, but unless I can access a helpful tech support hand, and/or a stable product, I am out.

Sorry you had such a bad time with BitDefender, but your story has a lot more high points than the typical tale of woe I hear from BitDefender users. The good news for you is that there are better companies out there & they are eager to take your money. You shouldn't have much trouble finding one to be a suitable replacement.

Yeah, you know I wanted to give them also credit for their past performance.I used and tested many antivirus software, and even those that are considered excellent by many people, gave me issues - some were small issues, like Kaspersky in some version caused videos to halt for a fraction of a second every now and then.

Or another antivirus (maybe also Kaspersky) that used the files Archive flag for something - which caused quite a mess with my backup software.

So many people just dont notice what these tools are doing to them, or they are not making the connection that it is the antivirus.

BitDefender was excellent in this regard, but has gone downhill in the past year or two.

I will probably try one of the free ones before I commit once again.At least with a free one, if I don't get support, I cannot complain...

All the free solutions seem to have more false positives than the paid solutions even ones from the same company. I figure the fine-tuning of the detection engines is one of those value-added features you get with a paid subscription.

If you aren't dead-set on a security suite you might want to give MS's new Security Essentials a look. It's an AV that's very light on resources. Since it's so new, though, it's probably too early to tell how good its detection rates are.

I've been playing with MSE for a month or so & am quite happy with it ... Which considering my blanket hatred for most things AV (Magic Bullet Baby-sitters) says quite a bit.

It's light on resources to the point of being unnoticable with the exception of the startup scan in the last build. But the lagg was over before it had time to really annoy me (statistically these days thats under 4 seconds - I'm trying to quit smoking).

Definitions come via Windows update which is nice (kinda), but adds a step to my morning routine as I don't run WU on automatic.

It does have a habit of FP'ing on keygenerators, but regulating morality seems to be an Industry Standard (for AV) these days so I won't (can't) hold that against it.

How well it works - It works as well as anything else, everybody has slow/off days and misses something from time to time & AV software is no different. The main question (for me) is how (insanely) huge is the resource footprint. I did do some bad browsing habits testing & it caught everything that I normally would never have clicked on. So if nothing else it's at least as good as I am...

FWIW, A few years ago, I gave up on all-in-one suites and opted for a mix & match approach.

For external facing machines, I use the following products in tandem.

Avira Antivirus

PCTools Threatfire

Comodo Firewall Pro

(Note: I generally disable all heuristic-based options if the software supports such detection methods. IMHO, these 'features' are far more trouble than they're worth. And there's also significant informed disagreement over the effectiveness of these methodologies.)

To date, this combo has given me very adequate levels of protection with the least amount of aggravation. And the overall performance hit from this combo has been negligible. Each app does its job well, yet still manages to play nicely with the others.

@40hz - I am also in favor of letting each tool do what it does best, but then you triple your cost.Why both ThreatFire and Avira?I am not very familiar with ThreatFire (not at all familiar would be more accurate) - isnt it another antivirus?

@40hz - I am also in favor of letting each tool do what it does best, but then you triple your cost.Why both ThreatFire and Avira?I am not very familiar with ThreatFire (not at all familiar would be more accurate) - isnt it another antivirus?

Sorry for the confusion. I should have qualified my earlier comment. I was actually referring to Avira's AHeAD heuristic mechanism, which generates far too many false positives as far as I'm concerned. The only time I could live with it on was if I set the 'sensitivity' so low that it hardly ever triggered.

Which brings us to ThreatFire. From my understanding, ThreatFire employs a hybrid approach. It does monitor behavior, but it also uses a signature database to identify and automatically lock out the most high risk threats. For lesser known threats, it offers you options for what to do. For anything truly odd that it has no information on, it issues a warning and a threat rating, and also presents you with options for next action.

I don't know if this signature check is what drastically cuts down on the number of false positives. But for whatever reason, ThreatFire does catch things that used to get through Avira. Prior to ThreatFire, I could usually count on at least one or two pieces of malware showing up on my machine after a few signature updates and a full system scan. So apparently the low setting on the heuristic scanner wasn't cutting it. But if I went and put AHeAD's setting on 'medium,' it would be constantly complaining about something. It was just too annoying after a while. Hence my mix & match approach.

Once I had ThreatFire, I put Avira's setting back down to low as a test. TF routinely caught things that were getting through. If I bopped Avira's setting back up to medium, Avira would then catch the same things TF did. But it would also return a pile of false positives that TF ignored. That's when I decided to disable Avira's heuristic and rely on TF for that layer of security.

Since I've adopted this mix & match approach, I've come up absolutely clean on every scan I've performed since.

So I guess the best answer is that I am currently using TF because it (despite all my biases ) seems to work, and does so without annoying me.

Hey 40hz - also sounds like Avira is not doing the job you hired it to do..... false positives... annoying.... low detection rate...I admire you patience - I would have uninstalled it and write a complaint somewhere if I were you...

Hey 40hz - also sounds like Avira is not doing the job you hired it to do..... false positives... annoying.... low detection rate...I admire you patience - I would have uninstalled it and write a complaint somewhere if I were you...

Nah. As a scanner and base level AV it's the best as far as I'm concerned. It's only the behavioral part that I felt needed more work. We've done some in-house testing (AVG, Avast, McAfee, Symantec, NOD32) and Avira always seems to do best overall.

I've also been told by one of the techs I work with that Avira has pretty much ironed out those problems with the latest edition. So when I get a chance, I'll probably disable TF and run with just Avira for a while and see if that works. Like you, I'm not too keen on having any more services running in the background than I absolutely need.

I am a long time user of BitDefender security packages - AntiVirus and Firewall.During the first few years, this product was my favorite among the competition.It was fast, not hogging the computer, had a low number of false positives, not causing any problems, and the technical support was easily available and mostly helpful.

This last year, I believe will be the last year I am paying my yearly fee to BitDefender.These are the main reasons:

1. It has become quite bloated with many different modules

2. Some modules cause Windows to crash when some applications are running (firewall + file sharing).

3. Technical support is now almost impossible to reach

4. When you finally get to tech support, you get a reply about 50% of the time, with a long delay.

5. The replies you receive from tech support, either tell you to download a new version (which was unaccessible at the time of trying) or to run a long sequence of debugging and "memory dump" to send to their technicians - as if I am paid to do QA on their products.

6. Searching their own forums for the same problem as I encountered, revealed many other people have it - they all get a personal "check your email" reply as an answer.

I am not sure yet which security package I will use next, and if it will be a free one or a paid one, but in my book, a paying customer needs to get access to customer service.

I hate to see BitDefender go down like this, but unless I can access a helpful tech support hand, and/or a stable product, I am out.

Dude, your story is very different than mine. I have been using BitDefender for a long time but I think they're getting better with 2010; you didn't say which version you have, I'm using their 2010 now- they improved it a lot, it's scanning speed is amazing compared to 2009 and it also looks different; never had issuse with tech support- I only had some trojans they helped me get rid of so..if you don't want to give it a try, search for reviews&tests on he net- they'll prove that you should.